Quantum Seeing 'New Opportunities' After EMC's Data Domain Buy

Quantum CEO Rick Belluzzo sees a competitor wiped off the marketshare chart and possible new opportunities in the channel for his company, which may eventually get less attention from the storage giant for its deduplication software.

We're not talking about a small transaction here. EMC
is ponying up $33.50 a pop per share in cash; the deal ultimately will
be worth somewhere between $2.1 billion and $2.3 billion upon its
completion, which EMC says will be by or before July 31.

Even the red-tape-rich U.S. Department of Justice, Securities and
Exchange Commission and Federal Trade Commission fast-tracked their
approval of the transaction. This is almost unheard of in this down
economy. The moral of the story: When the largest storage company in
the world decides to do something, it simply doesn't waste time for
anybody or anything.

All of this speedy business has been more than simply a passing concern for Quantum,
a longtime EMC partner that supplies DXi deduplication software and
virtually all the tape storage that EMC resells. With Data Domain's
well-regarded deduplication appliances now in its product lineup, EMC's
cup is now overflowing with "dedupe."

EMC bought Avamar Technologies in 2006 for $165 million, then signed
its partnership with Quantum a year later. Now it owns Data Domain,
which has a lot of loyal customers in the midmarket, where EMC wants to
expand.

How many dedupe choices does one company need? And where does this
leave Quantum, which relies on EMC as one of its biggest sales channels?

"Developments certainly were different than we would have thought,
early on in the process," Quantum CEO Rick Belluzzo told eWEEK. "It
moved pretty fast, with the government approval and all. But we were
not caught flat-footed. We've been talking to EMC all along. The more
important question is, what does this mean for us?

"This is a very exciting space in the industry -- it's probably the
hottest segment of the storage industry. We continue to feel very good
about the core assets that we have in deduplication. We've announced
some new products around virtualization and VMware, and we're
aggressively driving our R&D agenda to have better products and
take the technology further."

However, the deal does change the "range of opportunities" Quantum has
with EMC, Belluzzo said. Data Domain will be moving in as a third
participant in the EMC deduplication feature catalog and leaving
Quantum -- and also Avamar -- less latitude in the sales channel.

"We'll continue to work with EMC in the best way possible, but at the
same time, we'll pursue other alternatives to strengthen our position
in the market," Belluzzo said.

Pursuing other alternatives

What might those alternatives be?

"It's a pretty fast-developing market, and the reality is that this
move creates opportunities as well. We've lost a competitor, for one
thing," Belluzzo said.

"Data Domain was our biggest competitor, they're going to have a new
agenda. They're going to be pulled more into the EMC direct business;
the channel will be more available for companies like Quantum who come
up with products that fit their needs.

"All the other competitors in the industry don't have good solutions.
NetApp, by their own admission, felt they needed to make a move, and
they were not successful -- so what could that mean about their product
strategy? Data Domain partnered with HDS [Hitachi Data Systems], what
are they going to do now?"

Belluzzo said that this (the EMC-Data Domain merger) could be a defining moment in the marketplace from a Quantum perspective.

"Being one of the few players with a core technology in this area, we
think it still ultimately means that we have opportunity," Belluzzo
said. "It's up to us to be positioned for the most success."

Chris Preimesberger was named Editor-in-Chief of Features & Analysis at eWEEK in November 2011. Previously he served eWEEK as Senior Writer, covering a range of IT sectors that include data center systems, cloud computing, storage, virtualization, green IT, e-discovery and IT governance. His blog, Storage Station, is considered a go-to information source. Chris won a national Folio Award for magazine writing in November 2011 for a cover story on Salesforce.com and CEO-founder Marc Benioff, and he has served as a judge for the SIIA Codie Awards since 2005. In previous IT journalism, Chris was a founding editor of both IT Manager's Journal and DevX.com and was managing editor of Software Development magazine. His diverse resume also includes: sportswriter for the Los Angeles Daily News, covering NCAA and NBA basketball, television critic for the Palo Alto Times Tribune, and Sports Information Director at Stanford University. He has served as a correspondent for The Associated Press, covering Stanford and NCAA tournament basketball, since 1983. He has covered a number of major events, including the 1984 Democratic National Convention, a Presidential press conference at the White House in 1993, the Emmy Awards (three times), two Rose Bowls, the Fiesta Bowl, several NCAA men's and women's basketball tournaments, a Formula One Grand Prix auto race, a heavyweight boxing championship bout (Ali vs. Spinks, 1978), and the 1985 Super Bowl. A 1975 graduate of Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., Chris has won more than a dozen regional and national awards for his work. He and his wife, Rebecca, have four children and reside in Redwood City, Calif.Follow on Twitter: editingwhiz